Love Among Battle-weary Survivors

October 17, 1986|By CANDICE RUSSELL, Film Writer

Amost unusual love story is at the heart of The Year of the Quiet Sun. The principals aren`t young innocents, blooming with infatuation. Instead they`re battle-weary survivors of World War II, facing middle age without illusion or much hope. And yet the drama of their impossibly difficult relationship works because they are kindred souls whose love transcends the destitution of everything around them.

Norman (Scott Wilson) is an American soldier who volunteers to stay in Poland after the war and investigate war crimes. He comes upon a shy Polish artist, Emilia (Maja Komorowska), painting in an abandoned car. They are both gentle- spirited people about age 40 who are tentative about deepening the immediate attraction they feel. But Norman persists, in spite of the fact that they don`t even speak the same language.

He visits Emilia in her meager one-room abode, where she lives with her bedridden mother in the near-destitution of a bombed building. She offers him some of the cookies she bakes as her sole means of support. Somehow, with the help of laughter and a dictionary, they communicate. Photographs of Emilia`s husband and large house are explained by the mother as gone with the word ``kaput.`` From such simple reciprocations as Emilia`s dinner for him and his fixing their broken radio, a bond is forged between them.

But their love isn`t quickly or easily consummated. Aside from the obstacle of fear that Emilia creates for herself, they encounter setbacks from watchful authorities and translators who purposely get the lovers` words as well as their sentiments wrong. When the Army calls Norman to Berlin, Emilia and her mother pay a guide to shepherd them across the mountainous border. It is Norman`s plan to bring them to America for a new life.

Tenderly directed and written by Krzysztof Zanussi, The Year of the Quiet Sun turns on the sacrifices that a mother and her daughter make for other people`s happiness. Both are figures of nobility whose compassion for each other overrides concern for themselves. Their actions are taken humbly, without the acknowledgement of those they help, and the film`s poignancy derives from this.

The extraordinary hardship of life in postwar Poland is underscored in the character who lives across the hall from Emilia and her mother. She is a prostitute who slept with S.S. officers in a concentration camp in order to survive.

This is a film of surpassing sensitivity in which love, given and thwarted, takes on different manifestations.

1/2 STAR THE YEAR OF THE QUIET SUN

A Polish woman, ravaged by World War II, has a love affair with an American soldier.

Credits: With Scott Wilson, Maja Komorowska. Directed and written by Krzysztof Zanussi. In English and Polish with English subtitles.